Step 3 is PROFIT!, but you knew that already

There's a simple way to make a lot of money. A two-point plan. It goes like this:

Step 1: Find out what people want.
Step 2: Sell it to them.

Easy, no? Yet it's remarkable how many comics publishers manage to bugger it up. Even the ones who really ought to know better.

You may already have heard that DC's Minx line of graphic novels is being wound down. To be frank, I was counting down to the day Minx would die from the moment it was born. The whole enterprise smacked of... I don't want to say half-assedness, because that sounds like I'm accusing the people involved of not trying, and that's not quite what I'm getting at. But look at the line-up of writers, for God's sake. Mike Carey, Brian Wood, Aaron Alexovich, Ross Campbell, Derek Kirk Kim, Cecil Castelucci. That list doesn't say "we thought long and hard about who would create the best graphic novels for teenage girls"; it says "well, we already know these writers are good..." And that's just not good enough. Not for what DC were trying to do with Minx.

One of the ways in which the Japanese manga market differs from the American comics market is the degree to which Japanese publishers cater to their audiences' whims. If there is a niche out there to be exploited, you can bet your ass there's a Japanese manga publisher exploiting it. If there's a bandwagon to jump on, they will jump feet first. This requires three things: firstly, a keen eye for trends; secondly, tight editorial control so that creators stick to their given mandate and are carefully sheparded through every stage of the process; and thirdly, a hotline from your audience -- and, before you begin publishing, from your potential audience -- so you know what they're looking for and can gauge what works and what doesn't.

I didn't see any of that happening with the Minx line.

Japanese publishers have the advantage that they mostly publish works serialized in anthology magazines, with a constant inflow of reader feedback to give them an idea of what's working for their audience and what's not. (A similar system was in use in the British comics of my childhood and before; every issue had a little form for readers to fill out and send in with their top three stories.) Feedback is a lot more reliable than sales as a guide to what people like; the Direct Market in particular distorts the degree to which readers, as opposed to retailers, like or dislike any given title. (DM sales are not a measure of how much people like a book so much as how much retailers think people will like it, and retailers aren't infallible.) With ongoing single-title periodicals, that kind of feedback-gathering exercise is much more difficult; anyone who knows enough about the book to send feedback has already committed to buying at least one issue and is therefore not in the group that you most need to target. With graphic novels, it's effectively impossible: the work is done before the audience gets to see it, and no amount of feedback can recoup the publisher's investment.

Given these three models of comics publishing, here's how bad feedback works:

1. Anthology model -- readers hate Chapter 1 of [New Story] -- the publisher doesn't buy any further chapters and the project dies a quiet death. The anthology has room for new stories that readers will prefer, and the feedback from the readers gives the publisher an idea of what kind of story to look for.
2. Single-title model -- readers hate issue #1 of [New Story] -- reviews are bad; sell-through on issue #1 is disappointing to retailers; the second-issue drop is alarmingly steep; the third-issue drop is a bit less steep, but still worrying; the publisher sticks it out for three more issues, hoping for a recovery, then folds the title with issue #6. The publisher may try for a graphic novel collection to recoup losses on the floppies, but most likely not since the bad sales on the floppies have convinced her that the market isn't there.
3. Graphic novel model -- readers hate [New Story: The Graphic Novel] -- sales are low; the publisher diverts marketing funds to other titles* and decides not to commission a sequel (if she had previously intended to do so); books similar to [New Story: The Graphic Novel] are less likely to be published in future, but since the publisher doesn't know exactly what aspects of [New Story: The Graphic Novel] were unappealing, they may end up with both false negatives and false positives (rejecting titles that don't have the qualities that turned readers off, accepting titles that have those qualities).

* This may sound crazy -- why spend less money on marketing the titles that aren't selling? -- but in general that's how it works, because most of the time spending money on marketing a book that sold badly to begin with is throwing good money after bad, whereas money invested in marketing a book that is selling has a chance of yielding an increase in profits.

Obviously, the risks to the publisher are highest with model #3, especially when the publisher is trying out a new, untested product on a demographic they've never tried to appeal to in the past. There are other factors involved, so it's not as straightforward as my ranking here makes out, but all the same, if someone were to say to me: "Katherine, I want to sell comics to teenage girls. What's the best way of doing that?", I wouldn't even think of suggesting a line of graphic novels. With that approach there's a high likelihood that you'll bang out half a dozen GNs that you think will appeal to your target audience, and get it wrong, and be stuck with a backlist of titles with lacklustre sales, as well as flagging enthusiasm, bad PR, and no real clue as to why they sold badly, so that there's no preventing you from making the same mistakes all over again.

Which would seem to be what happened with Minx.

The fact that the initial announcements about the Minx line struck me as half-assed, as did pretty much all the later PR that I heard about, had nothing to do with whether or not everyone concerned was trying their hardest to make the line a success, but rather had to do with the fact that it all sounded so bloody familiar. There was nothing new in the mix. For all that DC claimed they wanted to reach teenage girls, they didn't seem to be willing to go where the girls were and find out what they wanted. Instead of the simple plan I outlined above, they came up with another plan, a plan that American comics companies keep trying out despite the number of times it fails:

Step 1: Give a fresh coat of paint to something you already have.
Step 2: Try to convince people that what you already have is what they want.

Now, there are times when "what you already have" is exactly what people want. Sometimes what you already have is what you feel like creating, and by a great good fortune, what you feel like creating is what other people feel like reading. This is how J. K. Rowling became a multi-millionaire: she didn't seek out a market, she just decided to write what she felt like writing, which just happened to strike a chord with a huge audience. In comics, Bone is a good example of something similar; nobody would have guessed that the world was crying out for a cross between Pogo and The Lord of the Rings until Jeff Smith created it, just because he wanted to.

But that was a fluke. Not the kind of thing you can rely on happening again. Not something you can build a company on, or even an imprint -- especially when you're trying to sell to an audience you don't have any prior experience with.

No, when you're trying to sell to a new audience that has no history of being interested in what you currently have, you can't count on them responding to it when you repackage it in different wrapping. And you can't assume that you know why they're not interested in what you currently have, either, because there could be a thousand reasons. You have to ask. Really, it's not rocket science.

Given the long lead-time the first wave of Minx titles had (over two years), DC could have run preview chapters in teen magazines. But they didn't. They could have launched a seperate website -- not just a subset of the DC Comics site -- with sample chapters, story summaries, and an email address for feedback. But they didn't. They could have sought out young artists drawing in a manga-like style and/or idiom, since manga is known to be a class of comics that appeals to the audience they were looking for. But they didn't.

I didn't pluck those ideas out of the air, by the way: they are all things that the publishers of The DFC did do, as well as: getting an internationally famous YA author (Philip Pullman)* to write one of their stories; starting out modestly with the intention to build a reputation gradually on the basis of a good product rather than pushing their brand front and centre**; using an unconventional and low-risk distribution system (i.e. subscriptions) to offset the dangers of launching a new product on an untried market; creating not just one but several ongoing series, plus competitions and interactive features to encourage reader loyalty; and, finally, and most importantly: publishing comics that are genuinely exciting and unlike anything that can be found elsewhere.

* When it was announced that the first Minx title would be written by "YA author Cecil Castellucci!" my immediate reaction was "who?" Now I know who she is: she's that YA author who wrote two books for Minx.

** From an interview with David Fickling, founder of The DFC: "I don't like branding... A product needs to acquire a brand, meaning you trust its makers because they've always made it well. The DFC will come to mean something if children like it - until then it means nothing."

It's not rocket science, and the way you know it's not rocket science is that somebody else is already doing it. They're doing it in Japan. David Fickling is doing it in Britain. It's all very well for Brian Wood to wring his hands and say that everything anyone could have thought of doing was done; this is plainly and obviously not true.

Insofar as Minx was a half-assed affair, a large part of the half-assedness came from DC's unwillingness to think outside the box -- to examine their own assumptions and determine which of them were true and which were merely comfortably familiar. They wanted to open up a new market, and decided that something pretty similar to what they were already producing was the best thing for them to sell in that new market -- and I am being charitable when I say that they "decided" this, because, to be honest, I don't get the impression that a decision was involved. The impression I get is that it never occurred to them to do anything different.

Pace Brian Wood, I cannot bring myself to feel sad that an unimaginative and ill-conceived project undertaken by a publisher known for its unimaginative and ill-conceived projects has failed. I don't care that this venue for creators has disappeared, because it was a bad venue, and all of the creators involved have done far better work outside the Minx line than inside it. (Just compare Aaron Alexovich's work on Serenity Rose: Goodbye Crestfallen to Kimmie66. It's obvious which is the project closer to his heart.)

As a reader, I don't care who's publishing the books I read as long as they're good; and while the Minx books weren't bad, they weren't so good that the prospect of fewer books like them makes me weep hot tears. As a comics enthusiast, I want to see teenage girls reading comics -- I want to see everyone reading comics -- but I don't care whether the comics they read are American, Japanese, Korean, or Martian as long as they're good. With that in mind, the Minx line was an inadequate solution to a non-existent problem. The only thing that surprises me about its demise is that it came as late as it did.